Humble thyself.

To counterbalance my temporary bout of paid self-righteousness, I volunteered at the local nonprofit movie theater tonight. I did this once before, on a really sunny Sunday evening where it was slooooooooow, and the staff and other volunteers were really nice, and I was totally in my comfort zone. Plus? Volunteers get free passes and free popcorn, what's not to love?

This time I decided to step it up and opt for a Friday night volunteer stint. The staff and volunteers were still nice, but otherwise? NEVER. AGAIN. In the course of three hours I managed to do five amazingly awesome things, including:

• registering $100 in tickets as "comped" in the system, even though I'd taken money for the tickets (the operations manager had to reverse everything one by one by painful one - he was a great sport about it, though, and kept reassuring me that he'd had to clean up far worse messes before, and it really did only take him a few minutes to correct... though he did send me upstairs to clean the bathroom right after he said this, which I took as a penance sign)
  
• almost burning the popcorn (almost! but I caught it in time)
  
• squirting butter on my t-shirt (I'd been warned extensively about this my first night, but tonight there was a line! and I was hurrying! because people love their popcorn! I mean don't you?! and as an aside, personal observation shows that EVERYONE wants butter on their popcorn so go ahead and just ask for it, you know you want it)
  
• pointing people to the wrong theater (not entirely my fault... but mostly)
• asking a guy who was not a senior, if he wanted the senior price (after that I stopped asking, figuring if they were, they would tell me)
  

And this was a slooooooow Friday movie night! I kept having flashbacks to "Doublemeat Palace."

On the plus side... They use chalkboards outside each theater to list which movie is showing, and my idea for chalkboarding one of the movies was very well received. After I acknowledged my major ticketing screw up the ops manager still left me in charge of holding down the fort while he and the other volunteers did other tasks (instead of making me clean out the recycling bins, which is what I probably would've assigned a volunteer like me tonight). And I got another free pass which I am sooooooo going to use to see Troll Hunter.

There is some old "me" that would've called it a day after this stupid night. But the new "me" is going to keep going back. The last time I threw myself into something like this, the first few attempts were awkward and uncomfortable but eventually I gained great friendships, great new skills, great challenges and eventually, even a great job. Who knows what could come of this?